


eight hours.

by sleepywoods



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pillow Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 14:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1350022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepywoods/pseuds/sleepywoods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter doesn't need to sleep. Felix, however, likes his eight hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eight hours.

Time doesn’t move forward in Neverland. That much isn’t news to any of the boys and creatures (and the mix of them both) that inhabit it.

 

What most don’t know about Neverland is how much Peter Pan influences its faux flow of time.

 

You see, Pan doesn’t need sleep, and thus, doesn’t need a night or a day or a dusk or dawn. He doesn’t feel the heavy weight of tired lids, nor does he yawn out of conscious fatigue (he does, however, yawn when he gets bored, and Pan bores easily, frightfully to some. When Pan yawns, it means the game will change. Someone will get hurt, and it’s never pretty). Aside from being at least some couple decades old -- maybe half a century, Felix’s lost track of time -- the lost boys, himself included,  are human. Mortal. Stuck in the eternal rewind of Neverland’s soils. Because they’re human, every single one of them requires sleep after a certain amount of time, and Peter forgets that. Felix doesn’t mind.

 

Neverland’s first and second inhabitant is not so much its King as he is its God. Pan lacks the emotions and sensitivity to influence the weather, but when he noticed how the long days and short nights exhausts the boys to the point where they fall asleep in the middle of his games (as a note: never fall asleep in the middle of his games, because once a boy falls asleep, he’ll never wake up, and the remaining lost ones won’t ever see or remember that he ever existed), things changed. The days and nights became more even, lest Pan conveniently forgets, which, again, Felix doesn’t mind.

 

_Sometimes_ , very rarely, even the enigmatic Peter Pan sleeps.

 

Felix’s treebase is humble compared to most. It is, for all intents and purposes, just a space for him to sleep, carved, axed and worn enough to hang a hammock made of boarhide when nights are too hot for him to lie down on the sewn wolves fur that he uses to cushion himself from (future, or maybe present) back problems. He doesn’t sleep as much as the others - too many things in his mind, whether it’s worry or wonder or both simultaneously, but he likes the idea of it. The night is the only time where he can hear the quiet (no longer able to hear the crying, thank god); not the boys’ laughter and pained moans and his own, scolding voice when a boy disobeys. But he keeps in mind that an average person, male or female, adult or youth, operate better on at least eight hours (whatever hours are) of sleep. He assumes it’s from the time he falls asleep to the moment he wakes up naturally, without being sounded awake by the other boys. A perfect night’s sleep.

 

This night is different than he ever remembers it, and Felix doesn’t know if it’s just the coastal breeze or some tidal effect or Peter Pan using his influence over the island to his advantage, but after so many decades in Neverland’s jungle climate, Felix finds it not cooler than usual, but cold. Then, a draft of air, sending shivers up his spine and prompting him roll to the side and blindly pat toward wherever he’d thrown his cloak, the only source of warmth he can find aside from the fur beneath him.

 

He would have been content with his cloak, should he ever find it in the darkness, but warmth finds him not in the form of an old, musky, worn cloak, but in the form of a boy, smaller than Felix, his back toward him and because Felix had been reaching, the boy is practically trapped under his arm. Felix shouldn’t be startled by the idea; Neverland has trained him to be prepared for Pan’s spontaneity for long enough to expect the unexpected. But still.

 

The warmth comes in the form of Peter Pan, and that’s startling enough to freezes in place, arm still draped over the King, the God, and he doesn’t dare make a sound, much less draw or release a breath. He can hear his heart pounding at his ears, so loud he hopes it doesn’t speak over anything Pan might say.

 

And Felix can’t possibly imagine why Pan would choose to sleep here.

 

“You’re the only boy awake at this hour, Felix,” Pan answers as he rolls around onto his back, as though he’d read the braille of his pounding heart.

 

“...What,” is the only intelligible thing he Felix manage, and he feels the shift of Pan’s head and suddenly their eyes are locked. From this angle, the only thing Felix sees are the dim, white glare from the moon just beyond the entrance of his base. Pan’s eyes says nothing, but that’s how it always been. He’s only readable when he wants to be read. Tentatively withdrawing his arm, Felix tries to articulate a more eloquent response. “What hour is it?”

 

Pan’s initial reply is a scoff, breaking eye contact to stare at - actually, Felix can’t make out what he’s staring at, but it must be important, even if there’s nothing of import here. “Evidently an hour that a typical child should be sleeping. I brought them to a land where there is no bedtime to speak of, and in the end I’m forced to create a night for them.”

 

It’s times like these where Felix can believe that Pan is a boy and not simply a representation of youth, because while he’s the face of a fifteen year old, he carries himself with an air of a veteran. No one speaks of it, but every boy on the island is aware of it, that Pan can be as cruel as any adult, but he doesn’t as long as they just follow the rules, unless Peter conveniently forgets the rules himself. Here, he’s certain the boy’s whining.

 

Felix turns to lie on his back. “They’re just boys,” he replies.

 

“That they are,” Pan sighs. “But what does that make you, Felix?”

 

Pan won’t see the way his brows knit, he thinks. “It makes me want to sleep,” comes Felix’s deadpanned response, which seems to suffice even as a non-answer because Pan doesn’t reply beyond a short, huffed laugh, and moments later the only thing he hears is his pulse and the crickets. So quiet he suspects Pan has left to find the next woken boy to talk to.

 

While Felix has taken a liking to stare at the wooden ceiling of his space, and he notes to himself that perhaps he should sand it down for no better reason than to make it more presentable in case Peter decides to stop by. His eyes feel heavy, and he welcomes it to roll itself to a close; he feels warmer now that he’s relaxed, and he can’t make out how or why, but he’s tired.

 

“What about throwing knives?” Felix’s eyes shot open, nearly jumping out of his skin.

 

“Uh - what?” He decides there’s no way he can be eloquent at this rate, so he doesn’t try to rephrase.

 

“Throwing knives. I’m getting bored of arrows, so we’re going to play with throwing knives tomorrow.” Pan sounds too delighted at the thought, and he leaves no room for argument.

 

But Felix, even his half-asleep state, has to question it. “Then it won’t just be cuts you’ll be dealing with tomorrow,” he says as a statement and not a protest. What he doesn’t say is that Felix will be the one to nurse those wounds, but perhaps that’s why the idea is so appealing to Pan. He likes that Felix does the work.

 

“That’s the point.” And he can practically hear the rise and fall of his brows to punctuate his words before rolling to his side, back facing Felix again.

 

Felix imagines what tomorrow is going to be like. They play with knives and daggers and a child loses a finger, two, then a toe to boot. Peter laughs, and other boys will join him with chants and cries to encourage more of it. The only thing that prompts Felix to do the same is the hypnotic pressure, enabling the cruelty because that’s just what they do in Neverland. When they agree to be a part of the game, they agree to the cost of it. And when the game is over and the pressure is off, Felix will play the sympathizer, the mother, the friend and brother, because sometimes all the other boys don’t remember how to be all of those at once.

 

Bandages. He’s going to need a lot of bandages, and water from the springs up at Dead Man’s Peak because they all know what Peter will lace the knives with and Gods he’s too tired for this.

 

“When do you plan on starting this game?” Felix asks, not that time matters. There’s a high and low sun, and their activities usually fits itself somewhere between those positions.

 

Felix doesn’t get his answer. When he turns his head to peer at the back of Peter’s head,  the light barely makes out the deep rise and fall of his broad shoulders. And it hits him that the boy actually managed to fall asleep on the idea that many of his boys will hurt themselves tomorrow, and he doesn’t know where that puts Pan on the scale of ‘veteran’ and ‘boy.’ Peter Pan is his own category of cruel. So Felix closes his eyes, succumbing to sleep.

 

\-----

 

Eight hours later (or, Felix assumes, because he woken up naturally and not by any bells or yelling boys, and not tired at all), he wakes and it’s still dark out, the moon in the same position it had before, and it doesn’t perplex Felix as much as the arm and leg that drapes over his own body when he moves to sit up.

 

“Forget about it,” Pan murmurs, and Felix will never stop being impressed that he can make a murmur a command. “It isn’t morning yet.”

 

Eight hours of sleep, and he isn’t tired. There’s nothing dream about this (biting his tongue so he doesn’t have to move to pinch himself, because Peter has locked him in place), and it should be morning. He assumes Peter has forgotten to turn the morning on, and Felix doesn’t mind.

 

 


End file.
